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Fedora Switching From CVS To Git

12-10-2009, 12:30 AM

Phoronix: Fedora Switching From CVS To Git

Package source control for Fedora has relied upon CVS since the inception of this Red Hat Linux distribution, but it's soon going to switch over to using Git instead. At the FUDCon event this week in Toronto, Red Hat's Jesse Keating has laid out these plans to stop using CVS and switch over to Git for its benefits: distributed management, it's faster than CVS, better patch management, and many upstream projects using this revision control system. To ease in this transition, Jesse will be creating a helper script to conceal some of the complexities of Git while designing this script around the needs of Fedora and its contributors...

Comment

CVS? Ouch, a project with the size of Fedora was using CVS at this age and time?

Welcome to 2009, I guess.

Wrong guess :-) Fedora is using CVS only for managing spec files in the repository. The actual source code in fedorahosted.org is predominantly git or other distributed SCM's.

Also I see a number of comments talking about Red Hat infrastructure. Note that Fedora's infrastructure is distinct and separate from Red Hat for the most part (things like bugzilla are shared). Fedora Project's decision to move to using git doesn't say anything about Red Hat's infrastructure.

Comment

Wrong guess :-) Fedora is using CVS only for managing spec files in the repository. The actual source code in fedorahosted.org is predominantly git or other distributed SCM's.

Also I see a number of comments talking about Red Hat infrastructure. Note that Fedora's infrastructure is distinct and separate from Red Hat for the most part (things like bugzilla are shared). Fedora Project's decision to move to using git doesn't say anything about Red Hat's infrastructure.

To that I have to ask, "why"? Reading the blog in the news post, people have been willing to move to a better VCS since 2006, so why wasn't this done earlier, *especially* since (judging from the blog post) the CVS repository suffered from "cracks" (I guess this translates to database corruption issues, merge issues and other well-known CVS problems).

Comment

Can't speak for Fedora infrastructure team but as a Fedora developer, I didn't really have any major issues with CVS for spec files. The workflow can be better with Git and I am looking forward to the changes but as Jesse Keating mentioned in his blog, CVS was "good enough" and we had a number of packaging workflow related tools was such as the build system connected to it.

The last time Fedora looked into it (references at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/SCMSig), there was a mass proliferation of distribution SCM and there wasn't a clear winner emerging yet. Now I think Git has reached critical mass and we can commit to it.